Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday January 21, 2013 @11:04PM
from the hub-and-ow-my-eye dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Igor Ljubuncic, former physicist and current IT Systems Programmer and blogger, reviews Fedora 18 with its new installer. In his role as alter ego Dedoimedo, the self proclaimed 'king of everything', Igor's Linux distro and DE reviews are often wry and biting and this review is no exception: 'You enter a world of smartphone-like diarrhea that undermines everything and anything that is sane and safe. In all my life testing Linux and other operating systems, I have never ever seen an installer that is so counter-intuitive, dangerous and useless, all at the same time.'"
The non-linear installer interface does look like kind of confusing, at least from the screenshots posted.

I am also extremely disappointed in this Fedora release. The installer is confusing and exhibits seemingly random behavior. I was so overjoyed I managed to get it to install it the way I wanted just once on a VM that I went and tried to install in a number of other places. No go.

And after you install, a lot of things are kind of buggy and seemingly incomplete.

Of course, since the installer didn't really work at all until you got to release candidate 4 or so, I can't really expect any other part of the system to have been decently tested.

This is a horrible release and should be skipped. If Fedora continues to go in this direction, I will have to abandon it, despite the fact that the only other decent alternative is Ubuntu, and I despise it. I've been an RH/Fedora user since 1999 or so.

For those of us fed up where with where distros are going these days, it's looking to me like Linux Mint is probably the place I'm going to end up. I want a system I can understand, manipulate and use. Crap like this installer, the new systemd stuff, I just don't need or want. Sadly it looks like Microsoft has little to fear as we're doing a good job of taking ourselves out of the game and market without them having to do much.

Given that the installer is so dangerous, I cannot recommend F18 to any non-expert. Who knows what it will do to your existing windows or linux installs. Maybe F18 should be considered VM only?

Screw Linux Mint. if you want a true traditional system then go with Linux from Scratch and roll your own. Alternatively, go with Gentoo and have more control then any of the other distro's offer.

My personal reasons for using Gentoo was the fact that it was actually the closest to what the Floss/Oss standard actually said while ensuring that you the user had the needed control to roll your own kernel when Debian had already made it damn difficult and the attitude on the forums/lists was RTFA NOOBIE. Sorry b

Well, those are certainly some reasons to use Linux from Scratch or Gentoo. However, you haven't given us any reasons not to use Linux Mint except the nebulous comment about "true traditional systems."

One thing that many non Gentoo users realize is that a Gentoo installation is completely customized from the beginning. This customization includes decisions made about the many dependencies and features that are pulled in during the build process. A good example of this is the ability to prevent "Gnome" from being pulled in or to include a feature that Debian/RH and others don't include by default but unlike a packaged Distro, the user has to examine each and every package along with the optional flags to

If you want control, screw Gentoo and go with Arch. There's no good reason to rebuild everything from source, when vast majority of packages are going to result in the same exact binaries all the time.

However, most people don't want a "true traditional system" in a sense of hundreds of terminals running vim. They want a simple to install distro that more or less just works and gets out of their way, but still lets them get down to the shell or muck around with configs when they want (as opposed to all the time). Today, Mint is pretty much the perfect distro for that. Or, perhaps, LMDE is.

While suggesting alternatives, it's good to suggest members of the same 'family' of distros, since the user might have had reasons for picking one. If someone's trying out Fedora, then alternatives would be PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Mandriva, Blag or Scientific Linux. If one is trying out Ubuntu, one might want to go w/ Mint, Hybryde, Zorin, Trisquel or any of the others. If one was w/ Slackware, try out Vector, Slax, Salix or Slackel. If one was w/ Gentoo, try out Sabayon or Calculate Linux. If one was w/ Arch, try out Chakra, Frugalware or Manjaro. In short, suggest something that's more likely to preserve most of the attributes of a distro, while avoiding the rough edges.

Scientific Linux is not an alternative to Fedora 18.It's based off Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, which is based off Fedora 12. Yes, 12. It uses kernel 2.6.32, grub 1, Gnome 2, System V init scripts and fstab instead of the systemd abomination, and is in short stable.

With Fedora, cutting edge is what you want, and bleeding edge is what you get. And, lately, hubris-high maintainers who don't give a fsck about the users, nor that Fedora is meant to be the basis for RHEL. F14 was the last usable Fedora from a professional perspective. Now, they're catering to dumb users and changes that break with the Unix paradigms that were there for a reason. Being different for the sake of difference and abstracted to the point that easy things become hard (or, in some cases, impossible) doesn't make for a good OS.

Devs/maintainers: If you want a new OS, go ahead and make one. But leave the existing "Unix-like" systems behind, please, you've screwed them up enough already.

Heh - I always considered "up2date" to be the original awful college laptop pandering move, and rejoiced when yum got capable enough to replace it. yum+rpm does a pretty good job of package management. yum's scripted and configurable. up2date relied on users having a throbbing blinky thing on their desktop and taking action in a way which was spookily similar to Windows Update, plus it had a bad habit of taking all your memory and CPU in the process.

the abominable excrescence that is Network Manager on a wired machine...

Try to get a recent Fedora or RHEL to work without a GUI or a caching LDAP client, for a quick and easy real good time (not).

Try Fedora 18. You won't even get an option to set the hostname during install. Apparently localhost.localdomain is good enough for everyone, because everyone will get the hostname set by DHCP, right?

As for disliking yum, you'll be pleased to know that with F18, there are 41 yum packages, six of which get installed by default, and most (but not all) of the rest will enable themselves on install. So you're never going to know how a system will behave. And upgrading using yum is deprecated, and has been b

Because/etc/rc.d/rc.mydb restart was just impossible to use thank goodness we have yet another layer to simplify things for us. Seriously systemd is mostly a solution in search of a problem it does address the boot time issue but does nothing else really better than what has come before.

I don't see what was wrong with the old installer. It was straightforward and covered all the bases. This new one was like a frustrating chose-your-own adventure, and left me fearing that I'd skipped over part of the process. I felt like it was fighting me when I wanted to erase various vista, ubuntu 10.10 and dell diag partitions and just give it the whole drive. I asked myself "they delayed the launch 3 months for THIS?". However, I'll probably stick with F18 for now since I'm reading that F19 will not have fallback gui. I use the fallback exclusively since I don't have to install any further guis and gnome 3's vino vnc server sucks rancid goat balls when I'm trying to remote into the desktop.

Mate runs on F18 and presumably F19 as well. And the fork of Gnome fall-back is likely to have packages for Fedora as well. So the desktop itself shouldn't really play much into your decision whether or not to stay with Fedora, and some version of Fedora. Lots of other things definitely play into this unfolding story.

Seems like devs are chasing mythical "normal/beginner" computer users and in the process leaving those of us who are a bit savy and use Linux in the lurch. In the end, they will have no users at all. Everyone I know is pretty happy with Windows 7, or more likely, Apple.I honestly can't offer them much with Linux anymore, unless they are a programmer and want the sweet development tools Linux can host (Qt and cross-compiling!). But I digress.

No. Just no. It's perfectly fine to have an opinion, even a bad opinion, and not doing anything past the expression of the opinion. It's not his job to fix Fedora. It's not the job of the users to fix Fedora. It's the job of the team working on it. If someone wants to contribute, good for them, but to each their own. The whole "It's open source, so fix it yourself and shut up" is getting really old. I love open source, but I hate people with your attitude.

Don't worry, this same thing exists in proprietary/commercial software, where you are not only paying just for the privilege to even use the software, but you have to hope that their vision doesn't stray too far from you consider appropriate. See Windows 8: If someone slams it and the Metro interface, or even just changes to the way the traditional desktop itself functions, you can guarantee there will be people around to bitch because you're using your right to free speech to criticize a product... that you have to pay an arm and a leg for in the first place!

Fuck them. If someone or something deserves a reality check in the form of a good slamming, then that's exactly what they should get.

I fully agree! As they say, there are a gazillion distros, so why should Igor roll his own, when he could go w/ Mageia or Mandriva or PCLinuxOS or Blag or any number of other Fedora based distros. By trying it out and feeding back what's wrong w/ it, the users are doing Fedora (or whoever else they are trying) a service, and it's up to the distro maker to decide whether they want to go along w/ them or not. But one doesn't usually get a lot of beta testers, so it's a reason to be grateful if people do ta

You know what? If Igor thinks can do it better, then he should fork that thing and roll his own distro.

Lots of people have something to complain about, but very very few pitch in and try to help or change things.

'Shut up or fork it' is a criticism I regularly hear directed to people complaining about an Open Source project, and it's a really stupid criticism.

The fact you can fork or even patch doesn't mean you lose the right to complain if you don't.

Complaining offers feedback, it tells the devs what the issues are, both issues they didn't know existed and issues they didn't know were a big problem.

The ability to fork is more of a check on the devs then a regular threat. It stops devs from doing really stupid things that might create a fork or drive people to a new one, and it sometimes lets two projects go in different directions to better serve the userbase.

Remember, users are not the enemy, if you treat them like they are the enemy, well then you won't have enemies for long.

Remember, users are not the enemy, if you treat them like they are the enemy, well then you won't have enemies for long.

This is more insightful than you think. It's also pretty damn obvious (but not to discredit you writing it, as it's still a good point as it's apparently not that obvious to a lot of people).

If you treat your users with contempt, they will not deal with you any longer than they have to. Once they can find a way to live without you, they will piss off at the first opportunity. Unfortunately there are many people in the open source community who do think their users are idiots and treat them as the enemy when they complain about the direction some software is taking (GNOME 3, Ubuntu, etc). Not just the developers but OTHER USERS in particular treat people as the enemy because they don't agree with them. Why the fuck? Linux users are the minority species in the first place - the last thing we need is needless fighting amongst ourselves.

Sometimes all a person can do is complain, but that doesn't mean the complaint is baseless. It has a use if it's part of a culmination of complaints as it shows user dissatisfaction. And that can be enough of a sign that things are going down the wrong path in itself.

Not just the developers but OTHER USERS in particular treat people as the enemy because they don't agree with them. Why the fuck? Linux users are the minority species in the first place - the last thing we need is needless fighting amongst ourselves.

To some it's a religion... quote related:

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" He said, "Like what?" I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?" He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?" He said, "Christian." I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?" He said, "Baptist!" I said,"Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?" He said, "Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?" He said,"Reformed Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off. -- Emo Phillips

Apart from that some people whine about everything, they're just filled with this soul-sapping pessimism and aura of negativity that everything is wrong and hopeless and you should just give up before you've even tried and that this is worthless and a waste of effort and they told you so. You go to a restaurant and they either complain about the queue or the location or the seating or the decoration or the waiting time or the service or that the food is lukewarm or f

Apart from that some people whine about everything, they're just filled with this soul-sapping pessimism and aura of negativity that everything is wrong and hopeless and you should just give up before you've even tried and that this is worthless and a waste of effort and they told you so.

So basically what you're saying is that in order to have any right to complain about open source software you have to have knowledge, experience, and skill in programming? Because when you say "Why don't you submit a patch?", that's what you're implying.

Newsflash: Not every user of FOSS software knows how to program. Nor should they need to know. Unless you want it to turn into some sort of exclusive little club, in which case the worldwide share of Linux would drop by a good 99%.

Users aren't complaining because they want to be whiny or difficult. They're complaining because they see a flaw. If you want your software to be widely accepted, listen. If your software is just coding for self satisfaction, and you don't care about user adoption, then don't listen.

Except that you are not even thinking fully. The people who you claim "contribute nothing" actually contribute a lot. They are free testers of your product. It in and of itself is a very valuable asset to have. The people who dont even give valuable feedback should be the target of your ire, not people who do.

Firefox was established to end IE6's reign of terror on the web, and bring web standards back into play, benefiting everyone. Would they have accomplished that without the millions of "freeloaders" who eagerly downloaded and installed it, slowly chipping away at IE's numbers?

I realize that doesn't apply to every case, but it certainly does in some.

Even when both user and dev are programmers of the same skill level there's a huge gulf in knowledge. A 5 hour patch for the user might be a 5 minute job for a dev since they've already learned the code. So I generally use my dev skills to give a really good description of the problem and test cases. Usually the only times I write a patch are when it's a feature specifically for me, or I've gone into so much detail finding the bug I already found the fix. I consider that to be a good contribution to the community and on projects I've managed in the past I really appreciated users who gave good bug reports.

Tone is also a big factor of course, I find general nagging to be more acceptable for a large project where the individual devs have less personal stake in the project (and are more likely to be paid). Ragging on a one person hobby project is just kinda pointless.

The reverse is often also true. As a senior engineer, I'm aware of older tools and subtleties that a developer may not know. Sanitizing inputs, the differences between the tools in the installed operating system, and those within the installer environment itself are excellent examples. For Fedora and Red Hat, most people installing Linux are unaware that you can hit "Ctrl-Alt-F2" to get an active shell in the installation environment, a shell with which one can probe and even reconfigure disks and network d

Why is providing feedback whining to you? I find it to be more helpful than random patches or other contributions.

Thing is, I don't want everyone and their brother submitting patches to a project I work on. I prefer the coding to be done by a core group of people I've vetted and know they are willing to maintain what they submit. I'd much rather get feedback to see if my ideas are headed in the right way my userbase wants it to be headed. Sure, I don't always go in that direction, but it's helpful to see what they want. And it way beats a poorly written patch submitted by someone who doesn't want to maintain it.

I don't think I buy that "analysis" (using the term loosely). I mean, ultimately, the point of the gift is to be of use to people. If your gift isn't useful to people, you need to know that -- so you need those complaints.

Which is to say: The complaints are a contribution, and in this case, one desperately needed.

You know what? If Igor thinks can do it better, then he should fork that thing and roll his own distro.

Or, instead of forking, contribute a patch or two to improve things.
I thought I could improve RAID in the Linux kernel, so I did. Patch accepted, so now when I download a new version of Linux, it includes my fix and thousand of improvements others have made. I thought I could improve Apache, so I did. Patch accepted. I thought I could improve Moodle in a half a dozen ways. Half a dozen patches accepted. I thought I could improve Linux:LVM. I'm now the maintainer.

Forking is the last resort, when no reasonable patches are accepted. If you don't like the way something works in OSS, contribute a fix.

And when you can't write a patch (for example because you're unfamiliar with the codebase and/or languare or aren't a programmer), complain constructively. If possible this means writing a detailes bug report. If you can't do that you'll have to find some other way to get the devs' attention without becoming rude.

Case in point: I'm not a C++ developer and entirely unfamiliar with the Chrome codebase but I found and reported a rendering bug in Chrome. The devs agreed that it was a bug and it's been fixed in the trunk recently.

This is the same flawed mentality that has prevented Linux on the desktop from becoming more popular/usable.
Instead of listening to criticism and using it to improve the software, it's disregarded/discarded because it's the easiest option.
"So and so doesn't know what he's talking about. Meh."
Thousands of beta-testers over the years have been completely ignored because a small handful of geeks have been able to manually fix the crap that didn't work, after the fact, and just don't care to put the time

This is the same flawed mentality that has prevented Linux on the desktop from becoming more popular/usable. Instead of listening to criticism and using it to improve the software, it's disregarded/discarded because it's the easiest option. "So and so doesn't know what he's talking about. Meh."

It's only gotten worse the past few years, since it's worked for Apple, and it's really starting to feel like everyone from GNOME to Microsoft wants to be them now. Too bad the philiosophy fails to take into account the "peculiarities" of Apples ecosystem.

Find a mac and reinstall the OS on it some time. It is the epitomy of painless. It is safe by default and will not wipe out your data. It has a consistent UI.

The problem is everyone copying the widget set Apple us, without doing any of the back-end engineering to make it work. IMHO the UI fluff on the mac is the LEAST impressive aspect of OS X - the underlying layers of Quartz, Core storage, fs-events, Grand Central, etc. are all far more impressive in terms of engineering - and while the muppets putting out Fedora are focusing on killing the advantages Linux has by reducing options in the name of UI simplification and BREAKING SHIT in the process, Apple is doing more work in the back end to bring stuff about like SSD caching that solves real world problems (e.g.. "i has an ssd and a hd and but don't want to manually manage storage").

Linux devs! Stop breaking Linux to make it UI-simple. Make the back end stuff work properly.

If i want to use something that looks like a Mac, it better WORK like a Mac underneath. Something that looks like a mac but doesn't work is not going to cut it. The UI is very much a secondary reason as to why I am a Mac user today, and used to be a Linux user prior to 2006.

To what end do you think people criticize? I would suggest there are two reasons:

On the one hand, some offer criticism out of appreciation for a thing. If, for example, I appreciate my country I will criticize its policies when those may lead its harm. Perhaps another may do the same in appreciation for a given distro.

On the other hand, some criticize simply because they enjoy complaining about what others do. These may be detected from the following: first, if they offer any suggestions, it will be sugge

Considering Linux is over 2 decades old, one has to wonder why the installer is re-written every other year. Slackware seems to have been the only distribution to get this stuff right. If it ain't broke, don't fucking fix it!

So, after I got a working install, mysteriously all of my windows end up blank. It seems to be some sort of weird font issue. I got them to show up correctly once, but they don't anymore.

And I have 5 or ten partitions scattered over 4 disks. I have three separate btrfs volumes, and a smattering of other things. It was nearly impossible to get the install to do something reasonable. I ended up telling it to use the one disk I had that I could wipe most stuff out on.

I installed F18 last week on my machine that has been running F16 since it came out, which was a little over a year ago. That system was upgraded from F14. My next upgrade will be to F20. Once a year is not a bad deal. And I don't have to do it then if you don't want - but eventually they do stop supporting the older versions and I like the new stuff that comes out. But I could install Fedora Core 4 on a machine if I wanted and run that.

With the change to a hub-and-spoke model rather than a linear wizard model, the new UI allows users to entirely skip screens that they aren't interested in interacting with, streamlining the install process to only those screens that are most essential for installation to proceed.

So, it's like the Debian installer, only less powerful and more confusing!

Agreed. Debian got it right. Installation is a mostly linear process. There may be some steps that can be skipped in some cases, but the order will not really change. You never install the base system before partitioning the drive, etc. I am an expert and I very rarely have any need or desire to go out of order with a Debian installation.

I appreciate that Fedora wants to accommodate those rare cases, but doing away with all concept of a linear order isn't the way to do it. I can't imagine what they're thinking with Fedora.

> So, it's like the Debian installer, only less powerful and more confusing!

Well, yeah, but it's a lot of new code for this release. I'm hoping in Erwin's Kitty they will have an advanced button that will help out. If nothing else, at least have a way to get more package granularity.

A beta of Fedora 18's installer completely wiped my hard drive. I told it to partition the drive. It partitioned it, installed Linux fine, and ALSO formatted every NTFS partition to a fresh EXT4. Even for a beta, this is a sign there's something seriously wrong. After using SuSE for years, then Ubuntu for years, then a very brief love affair with Fedora 17 KDE (mainly, delta RPM updates), I returned to OpenSuSE after 10 years away and probably will never switch away again. As far as integrated admin tools and the installer, OpenSuSE's have always been exceptional.
Also, my reason for switching from DEB to RPM-based distro was it seems Debian's core package management tools haven't seemed to evolve much in years while RPM appears to have improved quite a bit. The delta-compressed updates is a huge deal for me, but also the general speed of the tools. OpenSuSE's zypper tool also gives a bit of freedom in installing 'unmatched' later versions of libs but if things go wrong, it's easy to trace and downgrade. Also, the package management tools integrate with btrfs snapshots and there's a powerful tool called 'snapper' which gives you quick access to rollback or version diffs.

After using SuSE for years, then Ubuntu for years, then a very brief love affair with Fedora 17 KDE (mainly, delta RPM updates), I returned to OpenSuSE after 10 years away and probably will never switch away again. As far as integrated admin tools and the installer, OpenSuSE's have always been exceptional.

I started with Slackware, then switched to Debian in late 1999 and have been using it since. However I recently tried a bunch of distros, one of which was OpenSuSE (12.1) with KDE4 and I was surprised at how much I liked it. If I ever switch away from Debian, OpenSuSE would be one of my top choices. I also liked Arch (super-fast package installs, but there's no graphical installer) and Vector Linux (based on Slackware but with package management). I also liked Fedora 17, but for obvious reasons I don't

Couldn't get it to boot...unfortunately I'm one of those charlatans that made the fatal mistake of buying a computer with UEFI and no way to turn secure boot off (HP p6-2142), I can't get it to boot anything other than Windows 7, Ubuntu or Fedora. And I was hoping to use FreeBSD...

:-( Secure boot is a nightmare. On top of some UEFI bioses not having the option to disable it, another option is required to enable "legacy boot" mode; where "legacy" in this case means "anything other than Windows 8". Some bioses allow disabling Secure Boot, yet still don't have a "legacy boot" option.:-/

What I'm really dissappointed by is that some manufacturers (Lenovo, for one) don't seem to include anything about UEFI bios settings in their documentation for laptops they sell. I recently had to d

HOWever, how the heck did the Facebook logo appear beside your post? I don't use FB, so am unfamiliar with its workings, but did you post your comment to Slashdot's FB "wall" and it appeared here?

I'm not the dude you asked the question of, but check out Slashdot's login page: https://slashdot.org/login.pl [slashdot.org] (you may need to be logged out or in a private window etc):

Sign in with:

Google

Twitter

Facebook

As well as OpenID, which they've had for a while. I smell the 'corporate overlord' decreeing that alternative IDs must be available, but that's just a hunch. Makes sense too, since Slashdotters are so well-known for loving Facebook and Twitter.

I don't understand what's happening with Linux these days. Buggy installers, crappy UIs in an attempt to change the "GUI paradigm" for whatever reason, unstable software (particularly compared to that in, say, Windows 7), kernel/power regressions, etc. I was interested in Linux because it was (at some point in time) more robust and stable than Windows, that it was technically superior. Now I'm not so sure anymore.

NB. I'm talking about desktop use; I'm sure Linux is superior in many ways for servers and embedded devices - the desktop experience as a whole still seems rather immature still unfortunately.

KDE seems nice, but it's also the anti-GNOME - GNOME has too few functionality, KDE has too much. Nothing against a lot of functionality (I definitely prefer more to less), but when it gets to the stage where you have a dedicated checkbox in KDE which allows you to toggle between a tick or a cross for the Checkbox style, I think it becomes a bit too much. Makes it harder to find the actually useful options you want to fiddle with.

Having said that, the KDE team doesn't appear to be interested in destroying w

The only "poor ui choices" on the desktop are both optional and very much not-so-poor if used with a trackpad. I've actually been using launchpad with my trackpad as it is more efficient than exitiing full-screen to get to the dock. Just 4 finger pinch, optionally type or click app.

I'm quite pleased with the direction the UI has taken as of late - I've used everything from Windows 3.1 through 7, fvwm, amiwm, wmaker, kde, gnome, etc. in the past.

I haven't used RH in over a decade--but do remember years ago they had a decent installer that would even pull up a tetris game to occupy you while it copied files. Sad to hear it's gone downhill. (Or am I recalling Caldera's installer?)

A while ago, everyone tried to copy Apple's "intuitive" interface. The idea was, mostly, to make it confusing for geeks so it has to be intuitive for non-geeks, or at least they have to feel on equal footing, at least it seems that way from the usual results.

Now the source for ideas is Windows 8, the "everything must look like it's for a tablet" experience?

I installed Fedora 18 (KDE Spin, of course) on Friday and "counterintuitive and confusing" was a pretty good description. And the partitioning- yeesh, what a mess- please just give me the option for something nice like gparted. I was very disappointed. 17 was much better. Both were still better than Ubuntu. Neither is as good as Mandriva/Mageia.

There has to be a balance between streamlining vs. asking questions vs. expert mode. There is little balance in Fedora 18. I have a feeling it will be revised quite a bit for 19 (at least I hope it will).

Dare I say this is why people use Windows and not Nix? I'm sure you could recompile the mess to your liking though... Just get g'ma to do that.

I dare say that anyone making that choice would be mistaken - at least if it's for the reason that this installer sucks.

Does Microsoft allow you to resize existing partitions to make space for the new OS? Has Microsoft stopped their long-held practice of hosing the first primary partition & MBR as either gross incompetence or punishment for dabbling with the competition? Does Microsoft allow you to remove / replace the desktop environment if you find the bundled one doesn't suit your needs / preferen

It looks like there's an option to disable SELinux, which I consider a screaming pile of excrement. Previously, installing SELinux couldn't be prevented and disabling it caused the boot process to fail. I'm delighted that there's now an option to turn it off, if that works.

Too bad I rely absolutely on one computer, and can't afford the risk involved in a botched install of F18.

I don't know what I was thinking to enlist in redhats beta program (AKA fedora).. I never admitted to having a brain.

Starting from Fedora 16.

Put F18 disk in drive and boots new UI. My immediate thought was oh great more ultra modern zombie interface bs.

I was confused do I just click next and continue? Where are all the options/upgrade settings and all of the old raid/enterprise? Will it just be smart enough to work and upgrade my system?

What scares me the most is that I'm 95% sure it would have auto-installed itself had I clicked continue with NO prompting and no scary messages of any kind. I say this cause I later spun up a VM with F18 and when you click continue on the main screen if its not shadowed out thats it.

Then I give up and RTFM check wiki apparently you can't upgrade from anything earlier than 17.

Okie so previous attempts to use the yum repo approach always ended in disaster...burn DVD... upgrade 16->17 from DVD runs flawlessly as ususal.

I'm now running F17. Wiki says I need to install fedup to upgrade to F18... alright do that.

Reboot and the fedup fedora icon keeps blinking on screen as if it is doing something but nothing happens..ever.. I waited an hour and it was not even touching the disks... hit escape to check for any useful hints messages or errors...none...of course.

So much for fedup... fedup with fedup just way too obvious.

Next reboot to F17...hey I know I'll type yum update and ah try again..yea thats it... it downloads tons of patches and I reboot to an instant kernel panic.. apparently a regression..so I spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out how to change grub to prefer the old kernel version that still works. The files I found had an annoying nack for being auto generated with comments pointing to stuff only relevant for previous versions of grub. In hindsight uninstalling the bad kernel package would have been a lot easier.

So next I try fedup again after clearing out its data and surprise the same problem.

So much for F18 I'll try again with F19 and hope for better luck.

If linux distro folk are looking something actually broken to improve here are a few ideas:

Try replacing a failed disk in a raid1 intel matrix fakeraid setup with a drive of a different (larger) size... WTF.. honestly.. its f'in impossible. or mirroring an existing system without reinstalling. Also impossible. In windows it takes 20 seconds and a few clicks of a mouse.

Replace ping with a version that works with both address families like all of the other operating systems and all of the other network utilities.

Please keep at the least the basic x86 libraries by default on 64-bit systems so we can run the same commercial stuff without going thru unecessary hoops.

I have to agree with a lot of the criticism of the new installer, and particularly the user interface for disk partitioning. I've been running Linux since the late 90s and I don't think I've ever been confused by a partition editor, from fdisk on up - until now.

I mean, the error message I got was "Not enough disk space to create a mountpoint". WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!? And this while trying to get the thing to recognize my existing/home partition.

It's like someone who has never partitioned a disk before created a really bad abstract model of the process and then based the whole user interface off of their grand concept. In the process of trying to make things easy they made it hard for anyone who knows what they are doing to be specific about what should be done. A liberal sprinkling of incorrectly-used disk partitioning terms makes for a real perfect storm of confusion.

Once I got things installed, I had no problems at all. I hope to never feel that "oh shit, I hope I haven't just blown my/home away" thrill ever again though.

The times (plural) I've tried this installer in VMs or on Netbooks I've not been able to see the partition size box on the right of the screen so I had no way of having any form of custom partition sizing. Now given that the default is to split a disk in half for/home and half for / I think it's pretty reasonable that people might want to give 90% of their big fat disk to their data and a perfectly adequate remaining amount to the OS.

Probably because, from a quick glance, the only thing worse in his review than the new installer is the review itself. Seriously, he should stop trying to be funny, because, well, he isn't. I particularly love how he has no less than 3 screenshots of an option called "full disk summary and options" in a section complaining about how it doesn't display the full information about the disk (seems he never bothered to click on it). True, he shouldn't have to click on it, given the design of the installer, but c

It doesn't look like FUD exactly. That bit about two HD icons with identical model names side by side in no particular order isn't a geek vs. non-geek issue, it's a bad UI decision.

No auto login isn't geek vs. non-geek either, nor is having to root around on the fs to find the installer.

Things like that are just broken for geeks and non-geeks alike. It's a big step backwards from the old installer.

Red Hat installers have been buggy mess since forever. Even back in the days of Red Hat 4 there were issues like nag screens popping up but your crappy 640x480 display was so much smaller than the RH developer's magnificent 1280x768 display that the OK button ended up off screen. Another one of my favorites was a RH installer where you ended up filling out a form but to fill it out you needed information form the previous screen which was no biggie except.... there was no back button.... **curses** restart

You have to acknowledge some of his points. Showing two identical disk names without any further distinction is retarded, there's just no way around it.

Don't treat users like stupid sheep who'd be confused by/dev/sda or whatever it is. You take away all starting-points for them to even learn something. I didn't learn UNIX because everything was hidden away from me, I learned it because I _saw_ stuff and it made sense.

Anyone can make a system "easy" by hiding away all the details and anyone can make a system "powerful" by providing config knobs for every minute detail and drowning the user in debug output.

The real genius is designing a system so it's easy to understand and use, i.e. it's cleanly designed and "makes sense" and has well-thought config defaults, yet provides reasonable configurability without "overengineering". That seems exceptionally hard.

I will say that both Ubuntu and Fedora are going along those lines.Once upon a time the prevaliing community mocked MS for their over-complicated underpinnings with complex inter-component APIs, binary registry, etc etc. We reveled in our straightforward, plain-text configuration that was trivial to examine, if not a tad incovenient for developers to parse and human error could produce confusing errors for the 'uninitiated', but experts had the easiest time writing one-off scripts to do whatever they wante